Mystical places in Germany
4 legends · 4 cities
Cities
By kind of place
All places
Teufelsberg
A hill in Berlin heaped from the rubble of the bombed city over an unfinished Nazi military-technical faculty that would not yield to explosives. The Americans built a listening station on top, white radomes that monitored the Eastern Bloc until 1992. The station is abandoned now, the domes tearing in the wind, and the acoustics inside carry a whisper the length of the hall.
The Brocken
The highest point of the Harz, where German tradition has witches gathering on Walpurgis Night — Goethe sent Faust there. The mountain gave its name to an optical effect: the Brocken spectre, the observer's own vast shadow cast on cloud below with a rainbow halo round the head. The effect is real and explicable, and probably lies behind a share of the stories of encounters at the summit.
Externsteine
A ridge of sandstone pillars in the Teutoburg Forest with a chapel and a 12th-century relief carved into the rock. It has attracted theories of an ancient sanctuary for centuries — from 19th-century romantics to Third Reich ideologues.
Beelitz-Heilstätten
A vast hospital complex outside Berlin, built around 1900 for tuberculosis patients. A wounded Hitler was treated here in 1916; parts of the site have stood empty since the 1990s and are green inside.